Great Power Focus Underpins Military Failures

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. armed forces have proved largely inept at exercising military power as an instrument of national policy. Retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, in his review of Harlan Ullman’s book Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts (Naval Institute Press, 2017), concedes that “we have become less successful over the past decades, beginning with the failures in Vietnam and continuing to the frustrations today in Iraq and Afghanistan.”1 The cause of these military struggles, Ullman claims, is an inability of the nation’s political leaders to think in coherent strategic terms.

Putting on Their Masks of War

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